Making Money in Your Sleep
by Lady Kate
Summary: Alonzo reflects on his coldsleep career shortly after crash landing on G889.


Disclaimer: Earth 2 and all of its characters belong to Amblin Entertainment, which is probably a grave injustice, but that's just my opinion. In any case, I am just borrowing the characters for a while, so don't sue me.

* * *

**Making Money in Your Sleep**

by Lady Kate

* * *

Make money in your sleep.

That was the unofficial slogan, the hook the flight schools used to lure in new recruits. Pass the physicals and the exams, prove your competence, and the corporations will take you in, train you, and turn you out to man their cold sleep ships. All you owed them in return was a standard work term and a partial repayment on the cost of your education. Most of the recruits came from lower-level families with a heavy debt load, and the chance at guaranteed employment was simply too good to pass up.

The standard rate of pay was hefty enough, and then there was cryo-sleep pay, hazard pay. Premium pay for the longer jaunts; sometimes triple for the long long hauls. Bonuses for staying on schedule. Rewards based on safety records. Further financial incentives tied to rank and years of experience.

All that money… What was the old saying? Time is money. And that's what they were paying you for. Your time. Giving you money to convince you to spend your life in fast forward, sleeping through those months and years, then waking for a few moments, then going to sleep again, always waking up further and further ahead.

And the longer you stayed with it, the harder it was to get out. The first few runs were a blast. Go to sleep and wake up in the future. Six little months. It was a thrill. And more money in your pocket than you'd ever had in your life.

Even though you'd promised yourself that this line of work wouldn't change you – even though cold-sleep crews were notorious for being hard-living and free-spending – it didn't take long before you were slipping into the same cycle, because every time you went out, every time you went into cold sleep, you weren't really sure that you were going to wake up again. Spend the money, then; laugh and drink, live and love in the moment, because tomorrow was far more uncertain than anything in the present. Spend the money, and let it make you laugh, and when it was all gone, go back out again, so that you can get some more.

It hadn't always been that way. In the beginning there was family, there were debts to pay off. The disastrous, terrifying first run seemed worth it when you got home with salary in hand. Money to pay down the training, to pay down the skylift passage debt for your mother, for your brothers and sisters. They were so grateful; you felt like a hero. Another run, then; three and four and more. Money set you free; it bought freedom for your family. And all it took from you was time.

No years out of your own life – that was why the trade-off seemed so harmless at first. Your body lying in suspended animation almost the whole journey, and so you aged only four days during a year's worth of travel. Only two weeks of your time, but your mother hangs upon you and fusses over you because she's not seen you in three years. She has so many things to tell you, but you've spent all your conversation in five minutes.

And it's weird, but you can still shake it off, thinking you'll make up the time. Just a few more runs. The industry has a high turnover – sleep runners drop out all the time. And even though you notice that those who are bailing from "the business" have grown twitchy and panicky, like nervous commuters hovering near the exit doors for miles ahead, as if they're afraid they'll miss their stop, the last stop – as if all they can think is "I have to get off now, I have to get off, I have to get off now" – even though you notice it, you laugh about it. You think that kind of oddity is a madness they were born with, not something that grew within them after so many years of cryo-sleep. Not caused by it.

It's a delicate balancing act, and you don't even know that you're doing it, until that one day you wake up, after one sleep run too many, and you realize you should have stopped one run earlier. You've passed the last stop. It's too late. You come home, and your mother is dead – she's been dead for two-and-a-half years. She was old; she died. Your siblings are middle-aged strangers who make you feel almost as uncomfortable as you make them feel. For the first time, you feel it: the feeling that time is slipping away from you. It's eerie, it's frightening. The easiest solution is to take that quick little mental leap: _it's not me that's wrong, it's them._ Carefully ignoring the fact that your youngest brother has a son who looks more like your older brother than your nephew. Hell, the next time you turn around, you even have grand-nieces and grand-nephews, and none of them know you, but they are all so friendly and fond of you; they all know you have money.

That's when you change. Either you get tense and anxious and edgy, and you jump out of the circle before it carries you away from the last few familiar things you remember, or you just let go and go on. You learn to live with the sudden changes in your life, you learn to adapt and live for the moment. You drift away from your family, because they're an anchor to a place you can't get back to anyway, and you don't really know them any more, and they don't know you. So your crew and your peers become your family, your drinking buddies and your partners.

For a while, that's enough. Surrogate families. Friends. A string of lovers here and there to ward off loneliness. They're all like you… they come and go on a whim; maybe you'll see them this year; maybe you'll miss them and only hear about them through someone else. It doesn't matter. Everyone understands. It's friendly and pleasant and reassuring.

But then you start to take the long trips, because it's something different, something you haven't done, and besides, that's where the real money is. That far away, there isn't much out there – mostly mining operations, deep space scientific stations – and they're always desperate for their supply shipments and willing to pay a premium to get them. There are plenty of crews willing to fill the shorter charters, but not so many who are willing to sign up when the round-trip run time starts creeping up to double-digits.

And it isn't long before you learn to love the long hauls, getting the chances to see those vast far-away places that so few people see. You get a rep as a long-distance hauler; sturdy and competent and professional, without a hint of the mental instability that appears in most long-time cold-sleepers. You don't get the dreams the others do, the endless cryo-sleep dreaming that drives some people mad. And the longer you work, the higher your rate of pay climbs. A good pilot, with so many years of experience, is hard to find and always in demand.

That's how I got where I am now.

I'm expensive, I'm damn expensive – only someone like Devon Adair could possibly afford to put out the money for 44 years of my time.

Approximately 22 years of travel to G889. She'd been looking for a one-way trip to the edge of the universe. For an outrageous fee, I'd agreed to take her. The plan was to orbit for a week or so, making sure that her little colony was set up, that they had everything they needed. And then I'd wheel the ship around and we'd head back towards station-space, and spend another 22 years in sleeping. When we woke, we'd all be rich and happy for quite a while.

It didn't happen – it's all fallen apart.

I've fallen from the sky. Broken. Shattered. Like the Eden Advance ship, in pieces. That thought – actually losing a ship, when I've never lost one before, not once in all these years – hurts almost more than the broken leg, which is bad enough.

But the sleeping is even worse. Falling asleep from exhaustion, from all the painkillers the doctor keeps pumping into me, and waking to find that only a few hours have passed. Hours! And realizing, with cold terror, that this is what life will be like now… life in slow motion – minutes and hours and days. I used to skip over decades in a moment; now I can scarcely sleep.

Worst of all… I've begun to dream. God, I haven't dreamed in years. I don't dream.

Nightmares.

Every time I close my eyes… Creatures that don't exist, that can't exist… trying to talk to me. Voices in my head.

I suppose it's the cryo-sleep, finally catching up with me. I'm going insane.

The others – the colonists and what's left of the crew – they think I'm half-mad already. They don't understand. Just because I can shake off a twenty-year sleep as if it were nothing doesn't mean I can walk away from it. The others suffered from the long cold-sleep; I suffer from the lack of it. I need the cold sleep. The body adjusts, begins to accept that cycle as the natural order.

Maybe it could adjust to day-to-day life, eventually. But now I'm afraid to go to sleep… afraid of dreaming… afraid of what that will mean. But I'm also afraid to stay awake.

I'd laugh at the irony of it all if I weren't so afraid.

Make money in your sleep. The only catch is that you'll die if you ever really wake up.


End file.
